This draft, too, was loaded onto the disk, printed,then brought to conference again. The text was farmore successful both in communication of meaningand in organizaton of material, Satisfied, Michaelmoved on to his subsequent concerns.

This refinement of text continued through half adozen more drafts on the word processor and severalmore conferences with the teacher. Michael nextshifted to sentence-level revisions. Every sentenceneeded to serve the purpose of elaborating his ideas,and each sentence was reread and often revised onthe computer with this necessity in mind.

In still later drafts, Michael was pleased with contentand organization of his piece and became an editor.Punctuation, spelling, capitalization and othereditorial concerns were now the focus of his effortson the word processor. A composition handbook,dictionary and thesaurus helped him here, as well asother editing strategies: reading aloud, listening forthe punctuation in his voice, sounding out words.

The ninth draft of this writer's piece was a polished,smooth essay which he felt was complete. The thesisquoted above is shown in its revised form below:

"Time" gives its interpretation of the newsfrom a biased point of view based on themagazine's political persuasion. Certaintechniques are used by journalists in order topropagandize. One method is composition, themanner in which an article is constructed andorganized. A second method is repetition, therestating of an idea or concept over .and over.A third method is presenting an argumentwhich is refuted by a counter-argument.

Michael was very happy with his piece and wrotethat he learned a great deal about how to revise bothcontent and organization. The conference method ofteaching helped him to learn how to write, and wordprocessing helped him to make his textual changeseasily and quickly without risking new mistakes. Thetime required to create and complete a piece wasmuch shorter than traditional composing methodspermit: only ten days were necessary for Michael'snine drafts.

Continued work with writers confirms myexperience with Michael: sound compositioninstruction is even more effective when students aregiven word processing as a composing tool.

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***********************************************Computers across the Curriculum:Using WRITER'S WORKBENCH

for Supplementary Instruction

Muriel Harris and Madelon CheekPurdue University

Writer's Workbench, a set of text-analyzingprograms produced by Bell Labs, has attractedattention because of its potential for helpingstudents edit and revise their writing.. Since all theprograms inthe set are now commercially available,there is a greater likelihood that what was originallymeant as editing aids 1 for technical writers will be atool for student composing as well. At Colorado StateUniversity, where Kathleen Kiefer and CharlesSmith adapted the Writer's Workbench for studentsto use when revising compositions, Kiefer and Smithconcluded that use of this computerized text analysisprogram "speeds learning of editing skills by offeringimmediate, reliable, and consistent attention tosurface features of writers' prose."2

At Purdue University, where three of the Writer'sWorkb~ch programs, STYLE, DICTION, and SPELL,are available for public use on the engineeringcomputer network, we had the opportunity to usethese programs in our Writing Lab for evaluatingrather than editing. We were not able, as Kiefer andSmith were, to have students use Writer's Workbenchto revise their writing. Instead, w7used the;---­

programs as aids in analyzing and commenting onengineering students' weekly lab reports written foran engineering course. Our initial assessment is that,despite some limitations, Writer's Workbench mayindeed be a useful analytic::Dtool ;:Vailabletoteachers who are aware of both its merits andlimitations. As a means of analyzing surface-levelproblems in a student's text, it assists the teacherwith some of the tedious editing and proofreadingtasks, thereby giving the teacher more time toconsider larger rhetorical questions of organization,structure, clarity, and so on.

1Lorinda Cherry and Nina Macdonald "The UNIX, --Writer's Workbench Software," BYTE (October,1983),241-48.2Kathleen Kiefer and Charles Smith, "TextualAnalysis with Computers: Tests of Bell Laboratories'Computer Software," Research in the Teaching ofEn.,gJish, 17 (October, 1983), 201.

In a pilot project designed to determine if Writer'sWorkbench could assist engineering students as theywrote in their courses, we used a terminal in ourWriting Lab linked to the engineering computernetwork across campus and read students' weeklyreports written for the lab segment of an engineeringcourse. After the students completed their reportsusing terminals in their lab, they simultaneously sentcopies to their lab instructor and. to us, via thecomputerized mail system available on this network.To be useful, we had to read these reports quickly,comment, and return them before the students wrotetheir next reports. To do so, we used the Writer'sWorkbench output to complement our own analysisof t~students' writing skills, inserted our commentsin each report, and sent them back to the studentsthrough the computer's mail system. For us, this-useof Writer's Workbench as a teacher's diagnostic toolwa;Par~fi uniqueopportunity "to offer on -goingwriting instruction in courses in other disciplines.

Of the three Writer's Workbench programs we used,we found each to have its own merits andlimitations. With SPELL, a useful program whichprints out all words in the student's report that aremisspelled or that do not appear inits 30,OOO-worddictionary, the major advantage is a time-saving onein that we don't have to read for most of the possiblecommon misspellings. In our comments we canremind the students about any spelling problems thatare evident as we Quickly scan the output of SPELL.Unfortunately, though, this spelling checker--likeany other--cannot detect homonym confusions,those common but potentially distracting (orirritating) confusions of to/too, their/there, its/It's,and so on. These must still be noted by the writinginstructor reading for such errors.

The DICTION part of Writer's Workbench movesbeyond simple editing suggestions by flaggingpossibly wordy or ineffective constructions andasking the writer to consider them. This program,containing a file of 450 words and phrases to avoid,reprints sentences from the student's report whichcontain these words or phrases and brackets theconstruction, as in the following student example:

The difference between AC and CD couplinglies in [the fact] that with the DC coupling thecircuits are coupled directly.

While "the fact" is indeed unnecessary verbiage,writing instructors might be more inclined to havethe student consider whether the whole phrase i'lies

4

in the fact that" might simply be replaced by "isthat." Thus, while the suggestions for revision in theDICTION program do highlight potential problems,teachers using DICTION cannot rely entirely on theprogram's output. However, its usefulness can beenhanced by adding to its expandable list such wordclutter as "is due to the fact that," a student favoritewhich is apparently not in the present DICTIONlisting. For a student's sentence which used thisphrase, the program reacted as follows:

The attentuation of the signal is [due to] thefact that capacitors attenuate low frequencysignals.

Similarly, it bypassed student sentences which beganwith "The reason for this is that" or "The reason forthis occurrence is beeause."

While DICTION is immediately useful to both thecomposition teacher and student writer, the outputof the third program we used, STYLE, is not asreadily accessible because the output requires someinterpretation. It does, though, offer an extensiveamount of information about the .text it hasanalyzed. It lists readability levels on threescales--the Kincaid, Colernan-Liau, and theFlesch--and gives sentence-level information suchas the total number of sentences, total number ofwords, and average number of words per sentence,the number of non-function words, the number of .words in the longest sentence, and the percentage ofsentence types. Its analysis of word usage includesthe percentage of lito be" verbs, passive constructions,and different types of sentence openers. For us aswriting teachers, some of the information wasimmediately useful, and some had to be studied andconsidered. If the output lists 31% of the verbs as "tobe" verbs or 42% of the sentences types as simplesentences, we weren't always sure about ourevaluation of these statistics. However, in thecomplete set of Writer's Workb~ch programs (whichwere not available for us to use), the PROSE programoffers some interpretation of these statistics. For thestudents in the Colorado State project, an excellentmanual was written for their use ("Manual forWriting with Computer Assistance," Dept. of EnglishColorado State University, January, 1983).

Our evaluations, then, of Writer's Workbench remaingenerally favorable. For us as teachers of writingworking under time constraints to offer some help tostudent writers, the output of these programs wasdefinitely helpful as a reasonably efficient diagnostic

tool for some surface features of the writing.Though not a complete analysis, the output did callour attention to potential writing deficiencies suchas overuse of the passive, overly long sentences, and atendency toward wordiness, and it saved us fromproofreading for most spelling errors. Moreover, itallowed us to add into an already overloadedteaching schedule some writing assistance that wecould not have offered otherwise.

There are other advantages as well. Deflating as itmight be to a composition teacher's ego, we foundthat students tend to respect the computer output ofWriter's Workbench--or at least regard it as lessarbitrarytha~;-writing teacher's comments. Afurther advantage is that while the novelty mighteventually wear off, our use of Writer's Workbenchgenerated interest among engineering faculty andencouraged them to consider its potential as awriting tool. This can lead to a stronger interest inwriting instruction within their classrooms, drawingthem into the writing-across-the- curriculummovement via the computer.

~**********************************************

Computer-Assisted Grading of Essaysand Reports

Jack JobstMichigan Tech University

Someday computers may grade our students' essaysand reports, but until then they can assist humangraders in this onerous task. I wrote a programcomposed of three major sections: the first is a simpletext editor for writing original comments; the secondsection consists of pre-written commentaries oncommon writing errors, principally in mechanics andorganization; section three keeps track ofbookkeeping. Questionnaire results show thatstudents prefer this type of grading over traditionalhand-written methods because it doesn't involvemarks on their papers, and it produces moreextensively detailed comments.

The program is similar to Bill Marling's GRADERand READER (see Vol. I, No. ·l of this newsletter) inthat it contains grammar information, bookkeepinghelp, and is written for the IBM-PC, One majordifference is that the program isn't designed to workwith student materials written on disk.

Students submit their essays and reports to the.instructor in the traditional manner, except that

5

they number each line of text in the margin of everypage. When grading, the teacher places each

'assignment alongside the computer keyboard andtypes in the appropriate line number next to his orher comment. If the student writer makes a commonerror, such as using a semicolon rather than a colon,or confusing "its" with "it's," the grader hits a key onthe keybord which brings up from memory acommentary on that particular error. Thecommentaries range from one sentence to severalparagraphs in length. After completing theline-by-line comments, but before writing asummary, the grader pushes another button and the _bookkeeping section of the program totals thenumbers of errors and prints the appropriate pagenumbers from the class handbook. When the teacherassigns a grade, the program writes this to a disk,along with the total number of errors and finalcommentary. This may be recalled at a later date tonote improvement and understanding of earliercomments. After grading the assignment theinstructor may include a short quiz for the studenton particular errors which occurred in the paper.

To produce the sense of a more personal response, thelengthier commentaries either include the student'sname (placed at different locations within theparagraphs) or a specific identification of thestudent's error. For example, in the two-paragraphexplanation on proper use of possessives, an examplefor singular possessive includes the student's name, asin "Mary's book." The commentary on "repetition"incorporates the repetitious word or phrase actuallyused by the student. The program accomplishes thisby prompting the grader for the element after thisparticular commentary has been selected.

When the grading is completed, the program takesthe information appearing on the screen andtransfers it to a printer. The teacher than staples theresulting printed commentary to the front of theassignment for return to the student. Whencorrecting their work, students match theline-numbered, printed comments to the lines intheir assignments, determine the correct punctuationor requested change, then correct their work. Thismethod of teaching mechanics and paragraphorganization promotes a higher degree of studentinvolvement, offers detailed commentaries, andshould be particularly effective since it involves thestudent's own writing.

I have not yet produced a version available fordistribution, but would if enough interest develops.